Friday, July 24, 2015

If you are like me, the concept of REST was something I understood but as a vAdmin I had no exposure to actually using for automation tasks. In short, the REST API provided with vR Ops 6 allows you to interact with vR Ops through scripts and workflows (i.e. vRealize Orchestrator). But before jumping into that, it is helpful to understand, "How do I get to the REST API and what can I do?"

For that, I have prepared a video walking you through a set of Postman REST calls I put together in a collection. I have grown to like Postman, which is a Google Chrome extension, as my REST client of choice. Using Postman, I can formulate and test REST calls that I may wish to use with scripts and workflows, or just quickly grab information or make changes.

If you don't have Postman installed, it's easy enough to start. Just install the extension; it's free (although there are additional costs for advanced features - I don't use any in this tutorial).

Next, you will need the link to my Postman collection for vR Ops 6. Once you have that, you are ready to watch and then practice on your own. You will, of course, also need your own instance of vR Ops to experiment with and I highly recommend you do this on a non-production system.